It was a beautiful day outside. Fresh, golden, blue and cloudless.
“Tima, look after your sister.”
And just like that the whole thing was ruined.
“But moooooooom,” she said in her most reasonable voice, “she’s BIG now, and-”
“No buts. Go and pick out the flowers for the meal.”
And that was the Firm Voice, so she pouted but did it. She took her flower-bag and her little sister’s hand and her pout and she stalked into the meadows with ill grace.
Bip wasn’t a bad sister, honestly. But she was so small, and stupid in that way only very clever and very young children could be. A cat was the only creature as troublesome. So while in theory all she had to do was thrust her own (very small) flower-bag into Bip’s hands and say ‘fill this’ and ignore her, in practice she spent a busy who-knows-when picking over a very fine bush before she looked up and realized that Bip had gone missing exactly one who-knows-when ago.
“Fuck,” she said, because mom wasn’t around and these things needed to be cherished even in the face of disaster. “Double fuck with peppers,” she said, because innovation was to be embraced, and then “fuck,” because three was a good rhythmic number for anything.
Then she started looking.
“Bip?” she called in the meadow.
“Bippy?” she called under the flowerbushes.
“Bippy mo mippy!?” she yelled in the shrublands.
“Bip you little shithead! WHERE ARE YOU?” she screamed in the forest.
Silence. There would’ve been at least a giggle.
No, her little sister wasn’t there. Which meant she was somewhere else, the one somewhere else she hadn’t checked yet because it was no fun and no good and just generally a bad time – not brutal, not painful, just wearisome and dreary.
Her little sister had gone off to see the dead. Which meant she had to go too.
Ugh.
***
The gateway to the village of the dead was very pretty. Smooth-polished stone, well-cut, and surrounded with carefully-groomed flowerbushes. A bird’s-nest had been eked out atop the archway. Probably a crow’s. They liked crows.
Tima had always thought it was all a bit insincere though. You kept the gateway of the dead as pretty as a postcard for them, but you never visited unless it was a holiday.
Or, apparently, if you were Bip and all you had to do was pick flowers with your big sister for more than five minutes.
She was absolutely going to give her shit over this.
And with that thought to keep her warm and angry inside, Tima walked into the village of the dead and fell over, which was normal.
“Oh dear,” said a dry, dry, dry voice, and a brittle hand helped her up. That was normal too.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine. Thanks,” said Tima shortly. The dead fussed over her a little anyways, brushing off dust and dirt and making annoyed noises. She thought they might’ve been a relative once. Maybe a great-great aunt? Or a granduncle. It was hard to keep track of your living relatives, once the dead got involved things got messy fast. Best to let them care about it instead of you. They had the time.
“Have you seen Bip?” she asked.
“Who?”
“My little sister.”
“Not sure, not sure. Was just passing by, you know? I had to go get some flowers and a crow-feather, so I was headed to the gateway.”
“You aren’t allowed out.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go OUT, just put my arm out. Sometimes the crows give you things if you ask nicely and have a few treats for them. They like marbles.”
“You have marbles?”
“Why not? Barrie makes them.”
Tima wondered how old Barrie was, and how long he’d been forgotten down here, and then she realized she was asking pointless questions in her head and dropped it like a hot brick. “Thank you,” she said, because her mother had taught her long ago that rude thoughts in your head went away if you put polite words out of your mouth.
“Oh it’s nothing. Best of luck.”
They must not have been a very old dead. One of the things everyone knew was true: luck was for life. The dead happened when it all ran out.
***
Tima started with the obvious places first, the landmarks. The places a curious not-quite-a-toddler-anymore would glimpse and scamper straightaway towards, wanting to get a closer eyeful.
Bip wasn’t in the village square, where the dead merchants gave away bread and raisins for free to long patient lines of shoppers.
Bip wasn’t in the cold forest, with its icicle trees and its snowflake bats that meeped and chuckled.
Bip wasn’t playing in the sand at the edge of the wine-dark eversea, with its single towering wave that loomed up above the horizon and made the sun shimmer through it like a curtain.
Bip wasn’t in the thickets at the edge of town, where the roads dissolved and the paths grew thin and the air was choked up with pollen and must and thick wetland air.
Bip wasn’t even at her grandmother’s house, which was so new and shiny that it was barely even rotten yet. Tima sat and had a cup while grandmother fussed over her and showed off all her new dead possessions, like her pet mice and her books and her clock with no hands that never needed to be wound.
“It’s so nice,” she told Tima, “just to rest.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’ve got to find Bip first.”
“Oh, there’s no rush, no rush at all. Things will happen. That’s what being alive is all about, isn’t it?”
***
Tima was getting fed up with being alive. It was very stressful when you were in the village of the dead; like being the only person wearing a hat on a sunny day. People’s nods and cheery smiles seemed mocking, and it was a terrible battle not to scowl at them. It was very rude to be angry with the dead, her mother had always said. Mind you, her mother always told her to keep an eye on Bip, so she was already breaking some rules today.
“Have you seen my little sister?” she asked the dead burglar, who was jimmying a window open.
“No,” she said patiently. “I’m very busy today. There are lots of locks to snap. It’s dangerous to leave things locked up here.”
“Have you seen Bip?” she asked the dead ferrywoman.
“Nope,” she said. “I’m fishing. Can’t fish without paying attention, and I don’t think a little kid would be interested in that.”
“You’re really right,” said Tima.
“No need to be grumpy about it.”
“Have you seen my stupid little sister?” she asked the dead fish.
They flopped at her insolently on the dry bottom of the riverbed.
“Stupid fish,” she told them, because there was no rule against insulting dead who were animals, and that made her feel better.
“You’ll hurt their feelings,” admonished the dead ferrywoman.
“They don’t feel it.”
“No, but I do. Why do you think my line has no hook? Go get your sister and leave me be.”
“I would, but I can’t find her!” shouted Tima. “None of you stupid dead know a thing about where she is!”
“Of course I know where she is,” said the dead ferrywoman. “She’s on the isle of the ogre, being baked into a pie.”
“What!? But you said-”
“I said I hadn’t seen her,” said the dead ferrywoman. “And I haven’t. But I hear a lot, sitting out here and keeping quiet.”
“How-”
“The fish, mostly. Now go away. You’re scaring them off.”
So Tima said “thank you” in her most begrudging and least sincere voice and left the ferrywoman and her fish behind as she trudged through the dusty riverbed all the way to the dry lake that held the isle of the ogre, which was mostly caked and crusted mud, thick with fibrous algae and sludgy with long-gone lakelife.
“Hold still,” said a big grumbly voice as she approached the shanty-shack that took up most of the island’s peak.
“I ammmmm,” said Bip – and it was definitely Bip, in high whine-form. Nothing could cut through the air like a properly aggrieved Bip. “But I’m bored, and it TICKLES.”
“It’s meant to tickle,” said the ogre, who was probably the ogre. “It’s pepper.”
“It’s in my nooooooACHOO!”
“Careful! Now I’ll need to add more pepper.”
“But it TICKLES!”
“But it’s meant to!”
Tima kicked open the door, and the first thing she saw was the ogre’s pepper-grinder, which was enough to capture her imagination for a long time. Surely nothing needed that many teeth that wasn’t a shark? Surely it didn’t need to be the precise size and shape of a cannon? Surely, surely, surely.
“It’s made from a cannon,” said the ogre defensively.
“Oh,” said Tima. She’d been thinking aloud again. “Sorry.”
“That’s fine,” said the ogre, putting down the grinder one-handed. “Is this your sister, Bip?”
“Uh-huh,” said Bip, who was picking at the edge of the pie crust. The dish was bigger than their bathtub at home, and a lot deeper.
“And what did we agree on, Bip?”
“… I got to be in a pie?”
“No, Bip.”
“Please?”
“No, Bip.”
“Pleeeease?”
“You’re going home right now,” said Tima, who recognized this conversation and also how to mercifully nip it in the bud. “And if you don’t tell her I wasn’t paying enough attention to you, I won’t tell her about how you tried to get yourself made into a pie.”
Bip pouted – and it was a good pout, all lower lip and burning sulkiness – but it was a white flag of an expression. Tima had won, even if she hadn’t received the announcement of it.
“I take it we’re done here?” asked the ogre politely.
“Yes please thank you,” said Tima. “Sorry about your pie.”
“Oh, it’s no problem. I wouldn’t have put her in the dish, but she insisted. Wouldn’t stop talking about how I had to do it because it was in all the stories.”
“She’s pretty little,” said Tima. “Sorry.”
“No, no, god no. That’s where all the fun is. Best have it while you can.”
“Here,” said Tima, and she threw her flower-bag to the ogre, who caught it in her big paws.
“What’s this?”
“Some fun,” said Tima. And she left, before she thought too much about why she did things.
Her mother would’ve said something about ‘building character.’
***
Bip was quiet all the way home – first from sulk, then from thought, then from exhaustion. It was always an uphill walk out of the village of the dead.
“Promise you won’t tell?” she blurted out as the gateway came into sight.
“Won’t tell what?” asked Tima.
“Won’t tell that –”
“Already forgot it,” Tima said hastily. Maybe in a few years she’d understand figures of speech a bit better. “It’s okay.” And it was, which surprised her.
“But I wasn’t supposed to see the dead.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyone.”
“Bippy, everyone says that, but nobody means it.”
Bip’s face did that thing where it turned inside out. “Whaaaaatttt?”
“Mom says if we didn’t see the dead now and then nobody’d understand anything about everything. It’s not allowed, but you’ve got to do not allowed things or else you’re not properly alive.”
“Oh,” said Bip.
“And you’re not allowed to say any of that to anyone.”
“But you told-”
“What did I just say about doing not allowed things?” demanded Tima, and the puzzled silence while Bip worked that one out followed them both all the way home to mother.
She could see why people liked teaching things. It was almost as fun as teasing. And that satisfaction lasted her all the way through her scolding for losing her flower-bag.